Stuart Hazell searched for incest websites during search for Tia Sharp by Sandra Laville, The Guardian
July 24, 2013 ·
Stuart Hazell searched for incest websites during search for Tia Sharp
Memory sticks reveal killer’s increasing interest in paedophile images
Sandra Laville, crime correspondent
The Guardian, Monday 13 May 2013 19.26 BST
In the midst of a high-profile search for Tia Sharp, the man who has admitted in the Old Bailey that he had killed her was searching the internet for incest and sex websites.
Stuart Hazell, who has admitted killing Tia Sharp in August last year. had a criminal record but no record of child abuse until he got on the Internet search for illegal images. Police/PA
While the 12-year-old’s body lay upstairs in the loft of 20 The Lindens in New Addington, south London, the home he shared with Tia’s grandmother, he pursued his growing interest in paedophile images – specifically incest-related.
Stuart Hazell had come into Tia’s life several years before, first as her mother’s boyfriend and then when he moved in with Tia’s grandmother Christine Bicknell shortly after starting a sexual relationship with her.
As Tia grew up, Hazell turned his focus on her. Using his mobile phone, he secretly filmed her as she slept in the bedroom reserved for her in her grandmother’s house. Images of her sleeping, footage of her rubbing cream into her legs – all were stored in Hazell’s mobile phone.
He took the images using two cameras that he kept in the house, where the images were stored on memory sticks.
The memory sticks, which were recovered from the house during a police search – one hidden out of sight on the frame of a door in the kitchen – showed evidence of Hazell’s increasing interest in viewing paedophile images, specifically of pre-pubescent young girls.
He visited legal internet sites such as fashionmag.com and carried out searches for young girls in sexual postures, then focused his attention on capturing images of Tia.
Hazell was accessing Grade 1 images – the lowest on the scale, but it appeared to be a growing interest. He also accessed images of bestiality.
Nothing in his background, however, indicated he would act upon his perverted desires in such a violent way.
Hazell’s father Keith was a recidivist criminal with offences including theft, burglary, firearms offences and damage to property. Hazell followed in his footsteps, and referred to his chequered past as the “Hazell curse”.
As a 16-year-old he began a criminal career which involved petty offences but progressed to serious drug offences and theft. He had at least 30 convictions, including for threatening behaviour.
In 2003, he was jailed at Kingston crown court for 34 months for crack dealing. In 2010, he was jailed for 12 months for possessing an offensive weapon – a machete. But there were no sexual offences in his past and no convictions for serious violence.
By the time Hazell moved in with Tia’s grandmother five years ago, he had had a sexual relationship with the child’s mother Natalie Sharp. He had watched Tia grow into a young girl, and it was as she approached puberty that his focus turned on her more intently.
Crack and drug addiction featured heavily in Tia’s life. Her mother and stepfather, David Niles, were known to social services for their drug addiction. Over the past five years there were several referrals to Merton social services for drug use.
These included a social services intervention after a referral by the police in March 2008 in response to crack cocaine use by Sharp and Niles. In October 2010, doctors referred a pregnant Sharp to social services over concerns about her addiction and the impact on the baby.
In 2011, social services returned after a violent argument at their home in which the police were called.
Tia, however, had never been deemed at risk by social services. Her grandmother offered her a bedroom at her house as a refuge from her troubled home life, little knowing it would prove the most dangerous place for her.
In the weeks before Tia went missing Hazell, 37, appeared to increase his interest in her. Throughout July and early August 2012 he filmed her sleeping, zooming in on her face, captured her as she put cream on her legs and, a day before he killed her, took numerous pictures of Tia as she sat chatting with a schoolfriend at her mother’s house in Mitcham, south London.
The following day Tia made her way to her grandmother’s house for the weekend, texting Hazell to meet her at Croydon station. CCTV images catch him walking with Tia from the station, the last pictures of the girl alive.
Later, with Bicknell working a night shift at the care home where she was employed, Hazell was alone with Tia for several hours. And this time instead of watching her, he made a violent sexual assault on the child – most probably in her bedroom.
Tia’s blood was found on a sex toy belonging to Hazell, his semen was all over her duvet, and her fingerprints were eventually found on the lens of his broken glasses – evidence perhaps that she struggled before being smothered to death.
Before he bound Tia’s body in a sheet, wrapped it in binbags and carried it into the small loft of the terrace house, Hazell took one more picture – one that reached the true depths of his depravity.
The image that when produced in court reduced jurors to tears and left the whole court visibly shocked – an image of the child’s naked body posed by him into a sexual position. END.
